Trump’s hope for quick second summit with Putin may be stalled as pre-meeting off for now

By Kristen Holmes, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s hopes for a quick meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin may be stalled after sources familiar with the matter told CNN that an expected pre-meeting between the world leaders’ key foreign affairs aides this week had been tabled, at least for now.

Trump said Thursday after a call with Putin that the two “agreed that there will be a meeting of our High Level Advisors, next week.”

“The United States’ initial meetings will be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with various other people, to be designated,” he wrote on Truth Social.

However, that anticipated meeting between Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov has been put on hold for the time being, a White House official told CNN. It was not immediately clear why the meeting was no longer taking place this week, though one of the sources said Rubio and Lavrov had divergent expectations about a possible end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It was also not immediately clear what impact the tabling of the pre-meeting between Lavrov and Rubio this week would ultimately have on the anticipated Trump-Putin summit in Budapest, Hungary.

“President Trump has consistently worked towards finding a peaceful and diplomatic resolution to end this senseless war and to stop the killing,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told CNN. “He has courageously engaged parties on all sides and will do everything in his power to achieve peace.”

Trump said last week after he spoke with Putin that he expected they will be meeting “within two weeks or so, pretty quick.” The Kremlin played down that timeline the next day, saying it “may happen within two weeks or a bit later” and adding that talks between Rubio and Lavrov would mark the first step toward organizing the Russia-US summit in Budapest.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that the summit cannot be postponed, because no date was ever set.

“You cannot postpone what has not been scheduled,” he told reporters.

The Trump administration also does not believe that a big stand-alone meeting between Rubio and Lavrov would effectively set the table for a Trump-Putin meeting, largely because Lavrov is not empowered to meaningfully move the process along, a senior administration official said. The administration views calls between the two aides as effective to get a sense of where the Russian side is on certain topics, but it does not believe that the production of a big meeting between the two would be useful, the source said.

A European diplomat described Lavrov as someone who is “100% loyal to Putin but who’s never in the room when real important decisions are being taken.”

“To negotiate with Lavrov is somewhat a diversion while the important discussions are only with Putin himself,” the diplomat said.

Still, the conversations about setting up a meeting between the two diplomats remains fluid, the senior administration official said, adding that it is possible that they meet on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is set to take place next week in Malaysia.

Rubio and Lavrov on Monday had a phone call and discussed “next steps” to follow up on the call between their two presidents last week about a possible end to the conflict in Ukraine, according to a brief US State Department readout of the call. Rubio “emphasized the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision,” according to the readout.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, described the call as a “constructive discussion” that dealt with “possible concrete steps to implement the understandings” Trump and Putin reached on the call.

A source familiar with the matter told CNN, though, that officials felt after the Rubio-Lavrov call that the Russian position has not evolved enough beyond its maximalist stance. For now, the source said, Rubio is not likely to recommend the Putin-Trump meeting move forward next week, but Rubio and Lavrov could speak again this week.

It has been more than two months since Trump held his last in-person summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. That meeting, which went on for nearly three hours, ended without a deal as both leaders touted progress.

Trump has since publicly called for Kyiv and Moscow to “stop the war immediately.”

“You go by the battle line, wherever it is. Otherwise, it’s too complicated. You’ll never be able to figure it out. You stop at the battle line,” Trump told reporters Saturday.

This story has been updated with additional reporting Tuesday.

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